DLNA – miniDLNA on Debian

DLNA uses Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) for media management, discovery and control.
I love DLNA and last year I wrote a review post about my Silver Stone DC01, which is used to browse everything from my TV. I will try to set up a little Debian Server with analogical usage to the Silver Stone DC 01.
In this post I will use OpenSource DLNA Server MiniDLNA and I install it on Debian squeeze (version 6.0.3).

You can choose between a static or source version which must be compiled.

Compile process:

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tar-xvf minidlna_1.0.22_src.tar.gz
cd minidlna-1.0.22/make

tar -xvf minidlna_1.0.22_src.tar.gz
cd minidlna-1.0.22/
make

To be able to compile please install:

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apt-get install build-essential

apt-get install build-essential

To compile it you must install some dependencies like libsqlite3-dev libvorbis-dev, make will show them to you.

After successfully compiling process use:

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makeinstall

make install

to install miniDLNA.

Edit MiniDLNA configuration:

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vim/etc/minidlna.conf

vim /etc/minidlna.conf

You need to fix only the following lines:

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# Set this to the directory you want to share and scanmedia_dir=/opt/Samba/Media
# Customize the server name that shows up on your clientsfriendly_name=dc02
# Database folderdb_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
# Directory for MiniDLNA logslog_dir=/var/log

# Set this to the directory you want to share and scan
media_dir=/opt/Samba/Media
# Customize the server name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=dc02
# Database folder
db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
# Directory for MiniDLNA logs
log_dir=/var/log

Spook, the service script works fine. After start of minidlan there is more than one process and of course more pids(childs) you seen. But there is still the the main Process-ID which is still the same with /var/run/minidlna.pid

Hi Puck,
thanks a lot for this very useful guide how to bring a minidlna server to live.
I guess I wouldn’t have made it without it.
One question regarding the start|stop script which for me doesn’t seem to work proper.
If I start the script with argument status it always tells me that the minidlna is not running eventhough it definitely is.
I figured that the PID in the /var/run/minidlna.pid file is always wrong and therefore it reports a wron status.
Do you have any idea how to fix it.
Thanks in advance
Michael